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Just Folks: Hershey Medical Center professor teaches through comics

By ANDREA GILLHOOLLEY

Lebanon Daily News

Updated:
03/24/2013 10:49:28 PM EDT

Dr. Michael Green explains the theme of his graphic narrative, Missed It, which was recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The narrative is based on a decision he made during his first year of medical residency that he said haunted him for many years. (Earl Brightbill / Lebanon Daily News)

HERSHEY - The death of a patient 20 years ago weighed heavily on Dr. Michael Green for many years.

Green had just graduated from medical school when a patient was admitted to the hospital where he interned. It was a routine thing, a colleague told him. Just tuck the patient in and put him to bed.

But it wasn't just a routine thing.

The patient died in the middle of the night.

"He had a heart murmur. The (other doctor) said it was old; that it had been there forever, so I disregarded it," said the Penn State College of Medicine professor.

But as it turns out, that heart murmur was aortic stenosis, a disease of the heart valves in which the opening of the aortic valve is narrowed.

Dr. Michael Green looks at some of the graphic narratives his students created in his Comics and Medicine course at Penn State College of Medicine at Hershey Medical Center. Green s graphic narrative, Missed It, was published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine, marking the first time a major medical journal ever published a comic. (Earl Brightbill / Lebanon Daily News)

"Potentially, if it was diagnosed and treated, he could have been saved," Green said. "It was a mistake that haunted me for many, many years."

Using this story as his inspiration to help other medical professionals, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a graphic narrative by Green and illustrator Ray Rieck, which marks the first time a comic has ever been published in a clinically oriented medical journal.

The comic, titled "Missed It," addresses a dilemma many medical professionals face - when to trust others and when to rely on their own judgment.

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A professor in the Department of Humanities, Green has used graphic novels for several years as a way to teach students the human side of medicine.

"I've always been interested in bioethics, but also figuring out ways of helping students become physicians who are more humanistic and have a broader understanding of the experience of illness than just the scientific side," the Derry Township man said.

The graphic novel that sparked the idea to use them in his classroom was "Maus" by cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman interviewed his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

"It just blew me away," Green said. "I had no idea you could actually tell stories about really serious themes using this medium."

He then discovered troves of graphic novels - and some memoirs - about people's battle with illnesses.

"I thought, wouldn't it be great to use these graphic novels to teach medical students?"

Green tried to find out how other medical school professors were using graphic novels in their classrooms, but he came up empty - no one was doing it.

Students read novels and are then given creative license to write their own based on personal experiences they had during medical school that are then published into a booklet and online.

As Green developed the curriculum for his Comics and Medicine course, he and fellow Department of Humanities professor Dr. Kimberly Myers wrote an article titled "Graphic Medicine: The Use of Comics in Patient Care" that was published in the British Medical Journal.

"It was the first time someone published an article in a mainstream medical journal saying comics have some value," he said.

In July, Green will attend the fourth annual comics and medicine conference in England this summer that is dedicated to the interaction between comics and healthcare.

Green said he sees graphic novels as an effective tool in teaching a complex subject, and he anticipates the medical community will utilize it more in the future.

"What I'm hoping is that this will open the door for others to publish their own stories," he said.

Each Monday in the Lebanon Daily News, "Just Folks" tells the stories of ordinary people who live, work and play in the Lebanon Valley.

Check out a compilation of the features that have appeared over the past year.

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